Communities moving to 'chat' based platforms instead of traditional discussion boards is something I've observed a lot in the last few years. Which certainly feel like a step backwards in my view. It keeps happening though, so I must he in the minority opinion on this.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Especially Discord is bad, because it cannot be indexed by web search engines. And the entire structure is not really good for long term, compared to dedicated posts in forums.
I agree, but I think it's easier for the community owners to get user to join their discord channel with one click, than having users to sign up for a forum, create an account, confirm the email, post in the right subforum and also deal with spam and forum maintenance. It's seen as less hassle for admins and users
it depends. Its not like every user and question requires a new account. There was a time where these companies had a Reddit group instead Discord. Its the same effort to create an account one time, but then it can be reused. Also there is this login with existing accounts (like Google or other methods), as a secondary option.
If we are speaking about a dedicated forum, that's another thing. But since I gave up Reddit and because Fediverse is small, I started back creating accounts for forums. But only if really want to be part of it. But yes, agreed this is not convenient and Discord has a plus point here. Also Discord is integrated in other services as well (I think on game consoles, not sure).
I see its pros and cons and why its successful. Also there is no better alternative for what it does. I'm just critical about the negative impact of it. I'm so glad that StackOverflow is not close like Discord.
It can be (linen.dev is one such solution). But the server owners have to set it up obviously, and often they don't. But it's not an issue if they cared to.
I think it's a result of trying to get support right now so you don't get stuck waiting for someone to up vote your question or having other questions push your thread further down.
I've been a victim of this myself and going to Discord seems to be better getting someone to actually help you, especially for niche questions.
I'm not saying I like it but I certainly get it.
Also for people its often an embarrassment to ask certain questions, because they think its a stupid question. In a forum, everyone can see it and comeback years later (which is a good thing btw, but for some embarrassing). A chat is forgets much quicker and better.
I think asking niche questions in a forum is very helpful too, otherwise you will only find common questions. Actually the niche questions answered and maybe corrected over time is very useful in forums. Because in a chat often niche questions requires the right person to be in the right group at the right time.
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Duplicated question, I'm closing the topic.
We're all jobless and don't want to talk about it.
... or forced to take-on un-related work and afraid of discouraging newbies.
I feel like a lot of open source projects redirect to a discord or private discussion system like slack (even worse).
And it doesn’t help at all because it can’t be indexed and can quickly disappear on a while on the admin side. You can also be banned for no reason. Searching those platforms is horrendous, I don’t want to search a badly indexed system and then ask a question because I can’t find the answer to a problem, and be told it has been discussed 30 times.
Give me a bloody wiki or old fashioned phpbb forum.
it can’t be indexed and can quickly disappear on a while on the admin side.
On a whim? Also, Google will be disabling it's caching feature soon.
Lucky google isn’t the only search engine then
There are several projects on GitHub I use that are sometimes hard to find answers for questions. They have closed the Discussions on their GitHub page, and if you ask a question by opening an issue they close it and say “go join our discord server”.
It’s frustrating. You can’t search online for any issues. When you join the discord server, you can search and find lots of questions, but there are very few answers.
Have you considered creating a ticket called "Can't ask questions without joining discord"?
Do you think it would have more answers if it were on GitHub discussions?
It would just get closed. They are strict about GitHub issues ONLY being for actual issues/bugs you find with that project. Anything else is either closed as not being an issue
The more time passes, the more information can already be found on the web (including forum threads) and the less need there is to post new threads to these kinds of forums.
generative AI "helps" with this too
why deal with stackoverflow when you can brainstorm with a chatbot that replies instantly
And doesn't insult you, and gives you an answer far more tailored to your issue.
And to the end user who doesn't know what they're doing, the end result is the same or the AI one will get them "further".
I say this because if you're following forums, chances are you're following guides, which means you don't understand what it is you're doing. Which is fine, I typically don't either, which is why I have a harder time with Linux.
But realistically, following the guide of Stackoverflow will hit a hiccup and you will be stuck. Following AI, things might not work and need to be troubleshooted, but it will continue answering questions until the two of you put together something that sort of works.
Not because of AI, but because the person kept trying. AI only made it so they didn't need to understand.
I find working with AI to help me understand way better.
Using Linux as an example. If I search for "give me the size of each subdirectory in the current directory" the stack overflow answer will be "just type du -h --max-depth=1" so you copy and paste it and, voila!, it's exactly what you want. Except I have no idea what any of it means.
However, I ask chatgpt, and it will explain that du means disk usage, -h gives a human readable form, and --max-depth=1 will only go down 1 level, without showing all of the subdirectories.
So now I've learned something.
Additionally, with coding, it's a lot like rubber duck debugging for me. Just formulating my question will often lead to an answer, or trying to explain what went wrong with the AI solution helps me get to the proper answer.
AI does give more reasoning than a forum might, that's true.
I feel that /r/programming lost a lot of volume and intensity following the API protest drama. This community seemed like a beneficiary. Even anecdotally though, I sit in a couple of language discord servers and engagement seems lower than it was a couple of years ago.
does anyone have programming forums to recommend? besides reddit
I thought the point of this instance was to try and start a decent one here.
It's no reddit in terms of quantity but honesty I've had higher quality topics and discussions here than there. Lemmy/kbin might not have taken off in the mainstream to offer a variety of subjects but when it comes to tech and software I think it's covered well enough and people are generally nicer about it. The main problem is lack of (remotely) good seach function, I dont think the threads are getting indexed by google and the on-site search is atrocious.
I don't know of any discord programming communities, I wish forums were still a thing but the only live one I know of is the jellyfin one after they moved from reddit. Other than that it's here or the various subreddits
Tangentially, there's a whole bunch of issues going on with the programming.dev server for one. See at !meta@programming.dev. Lemmy's upcoming upgrade to 0.19.6 should help - see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623 and https://feddit.org/post/3524876 discussing it.
Sorry for the confusion. I wasn't talking about programming.dev. i thought that's obvious because p.dev isn't that old
I did mention that it was only tangentially related. I did not realize though that programming.dev was not all that old. TIL.
Your account info says you joined Lemmy a couple of years ago. Could that have something to do with it? Could be that there are simply fewer of us here than wherever you were before.
Also, if Reddit is one of your haunts, keep in mind that a lot of communities there partially dispersed a little over a year ago, and not everyone has reappeared in the same place (or at all).